Twenty-three seconds after Kristine A. Kirk told a 911 operator her husband was trying to grab a handgun from a safe, the woman's screams ended with the sound of a gunshot.That information wasn't relayed to police officers en route to the home until about a minute later, after an officer reading notes from the 911 operator asked the dispatcher to "step up cover" on the call. By the tim...

I'm curious as to the purpose of the comments about how the house is a mile from the closest police station? This is the police department, not the fire department. How about a look at where the officers were actually responding from, not where they park their car at the end of the night?

It sounds like the dispatcher had a lot of information they were putting on the MDC, instead of actually telling officers like they're supposed to.

23 seconds between accessing the safe to execution.... that doesnt sound at all like the delayed reactions normally associated with cannabis intoxication. I dont know how long it takes to open the gun safe while sober, but 10 seconds seems incredibly quick if the shooter was so impaired by cannabis that the following day he had "no recollections" of the crime. In an ordinary case of cannabis intoxication the user often has delayed motor skills and reaction times which would make either a combination safe or a small set of keys challanging. Then he'd also have to remove the safety from his semi-automatic "home" weapon... The accuracy of the shot to the head and quickness with which it transpired again belie the claims that Mr Kirk was not responsible for his actions due to his choices to consume cannabis. I'd guess you'd have to be pretty handy with a fire arm to shoot anybody accurately in the head with in such a short window of time while simultaniously being distracted by your screaming spouse... Every aspect of this case smacks of premeditated murder with a planned cannabis defense... why did Mr Kirk go candy shopping on that particular evening 3 hours before firing that fateful shot? Has the post done any follow up investigation on whether mr Kirk had been caught on camera shopping at any other retail cannabis shops previously? What motivated a "leader in the LDS church" which is notoriously intollerant of all intoxicants to suddenly embrace behavior that is strictly forbidden? Why arent we also reporting that on the same day in Utah two other LDS "elders" also shot their wives and kids due to religious beliefs that the lunar eclipse of the previous evening was a portend to biblical end times. It would seem the Kirk case has at least as much if not more correlated casuation to LDS wife murderers than this murderer had in common with the roughly 20,000 (conservative estimate) eaters of cannabis edibles in the state of Colorado on a daily basis.

One minute later, Kristine told the 911 operator that in addition to using marijuana, her husband also may have taken prescription medications.

Three minutes into the call, Kristine reported her husband was hallucinating, and two minutes after he started hallucinating, she said he began ranting about the end of the world, according to the report.

Why didn't she take the boys and run? I wouldn't have bothered with 911 until I was blocks away!

wgb wrote:Summary: Never put your life in the hands of a 911 operator or the police. Sad, but that is the way it is. Far too many rules to follow and far too many incompetent people doing important jobs.

One minute later, Kristine told the 911 operator that in addition to using marijuana, her husband also may have taken prescription medications.

Three minutes into the call, Kristine reported her husband was hallucinating, and two minutes after he started hallucinating, she said he began ranting about the end of the world, according to the report.

Why didn't she take the boys and run? I wouldn't have bothered with 911 until I was blocks away!

Because she didn't know it would escalate to the point she would be a target and be killed? Because she was also concerned for her husband, the person she's lived a life with/had three kids? It's not like he was a random intruder. Maybe she couldn't get out away from him?

Last edited by Postgrad on April 24th, 2014, 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Big Lug wrote:Ah, Denver police... No matter how bad it looks at first glance, they will always find a way to shift blame and come out looking good!

Whether it's inept handling of a 911 call, faulty equipment, the shooting of a citizen, letting a dog die in the street, it all works out for Denver's bumbling PD.

And Denver's silent, incompetent mayor will handily win re-election.

It's all good!

That was my thought too. Shift the blame. It seems the operator was relaying exactly what was happening. There was very little time from when the gun was picked up to its use. Wouldn't have made a difference. I feel the mistake here was when the victim told the operator it was in a safe. I think we'll find out that when that was communicated, it downplayed the situation for the dispatch. That's why they're bringing up this issue of the gun possession being communicated. I think the error here is on the dispatch side, but they're trying to shift it to the operator. The police should release all the information now, rather than later.

Looking again at the timeline, there's less than 40 seconds between the time the victim tells the operator he's getting the gun to when she gets shot. That is miniscule and wouldn't have made a difference if it had been communicated to the dispatcher/police. They were still yet to respond, as far as we know. The officer asks for cover step up a minute after she's already been shot, and he still hasn't arrived yet. Anyway, we don't know much else about the police response because the police are unwilling to release information.

The call came in 30 minutes before shift change: "husband smoking weed"

The cops never answer "smoking weed" calls with lights and sirens on.

The cops want to go home, like most people towards the end of their shift.

They don't want to get involved in a domestic dispute involving spouse smoking weed 30 minutes before shift change; that means in addition to answering the call, delivering a written police report to police headquarters Domestic Relations Bureau on the other side of town before returning to District 3 substation and calling it a night.

The police writing up their shift report hoped to not respond and let the !0:00 p.m. shift change report after row call; but it was not weed but a hard liquor crazed type "A " personality.

Both this article and the incident report omit the exact nature of the communication when the officers were originally dispatched to the scene.

This article states that the original dispatch was "one minute after Kristine called 911". Previous articles have referred to the original dispatch as a "domestic violence report" without specifying what code or other information was included in the radio call.

It would be interesting to see the exact details of the original dispatch with some background on the "normal" prioritization of such calls.

Certainly, response times and the related allocation of resources are always important subjects but it looks as though part of what happened in this particular instance is that Mr. Kirk's behavior started as what appeared to be erratic intoxication and then suddenly and rapidly escalated into lethal violence

1 minute and 17 seconds into the call Richard Kirk asked his wife to shoot him. Kristine Kirk had previously told the 911 operator that there was a gun (in a safe) but there is no indication in the report that Richard had directed any attention to the gun. It can't have been clear if the "shoot me" request, disturbing but essentially passive, was an imminent threat or more in the line of rambling.

After that request Richard Kirk's behavior seems to have been free of explicit threats for about ten minutes, so the subsequent very rapid escalation was not the process of a steady build up to action.

Without hindsight, the first eleven minutes of this call may have looked very much like a relatively modest overdose situation; modest because large doses of THC are not dangerously toxic. Clearly, we are in the process of rethinking the psychoactive threat posed by large doses of THC, especially in conjunction with other intoxicants, but you could give a rat the same dose that Mr. Kirk took and it probably wouldn't kill the rat.

The gun (off in it's safe), the suicidal ideation, the intoxicated rambling--none of it was too compelling until Mr. Kirk sprang into action. Homo sapien is an unpredictable critter under the best of circumstances.

cheesecake wrote:23 seconds between accessing the safe to execution.... that doesnt sound at all like the delayed reactions normally associated with cannabis intoxication. I dont know how long it takes to open the gun safe while sober, but 10 seconds seems incredibly quick if the shooter was so impaired by cannabis that the following day he had "no recollections" of the crime. In an ordinary case of cannabis intoxication the user often has delayed motor skills and reaction times which would make either a combination safe or a small set of keys challanging. Then he'd also have to remove the safety from his semi-automatic "home" weapon... The accuracy of the shot to the head and quickness with which it transpired again belie the claims that Mr Kirk was not responsible for his actions due to his choices to consume cannabis. I'd guess you'd have to be pretty handy with a fire arm to shoot anybody accurately in the head with in such a short window of time while simultaniously being distracted by your screaming spouse... Every aspect of this case smacks of premeditated murder with a planned cannabis defense... why did Mr Kirk go candy shopping on that particular evening 3 hours before firing that fateful shot? Has the post done any follow up investigation on whether mr Kirk had been caught on camera shopping at any other retail cannabis shops previously? What motivated a "leader in the LDS church" which is notoriously intollerant of all intoxicants to suddenly embrace behavior that is strictly forbidden? Why arent we also reporting that on the same day in Utah two other LDS "elders" also shot their wives and kids due to religious beliefs that the lunar eclipse of the previous evening was a portend to biblical end times. It would seem the Kirk case has at least as much if not more correlated casuation to LDS wife murderers than this murderer had in common with the roughly 20,000 (conservative estimate) eaters of cannabis edibles in the state of Colorado on a daily basis.

The report lists Kristine Kirk's communication with the 911 operator. Those do not necessarily represent accurate real-time reporting of Richard Kirk's actions. She was concealing the 911 call from her husband, and that might have hindered her ability to observe him. She also may have been dealing with her kids or looking outside for the police. We don't know the locations within the home of both people on a moment by moment basis.

In other words, we probably won't be able to know how long it actually took Richard Kirk to open the safe. There could easily be a full minute that didn't get reported.

Re: handgun accuracy. Forensic pathology will present evidence of the distance of the shot and the relative body positions of the shooter and the victim. It doesn't take a great deal of motor coordination to walk up to someone and shoot them at point-blank range, especially if they don't realize or accept it is about to happen.

Richard Kirk's level of THC intoxication may be very difficult to prove and every aspect of his behavior should be subject to corroboration. Certainly, the police should closely examine the possibility that his intoxication was minor and that this was premeditated murder.

It does seem clear that Kristine Kirk believed her husband was out of his mind.

wgb wrote:Summary: Never put your life in the hands of a 911 operator or the police. Sad, but that is the way it is. Far too many rules to follow and far too many incompetent people doing important jobs.

You should go on down and show them how its done there buddy.

If you are going to disagree with the facts, you have to state your case. The facts do not defend the DPD or the 911 system buddy.

retro-grouch wrote:Both this article and the incident report omit the exact nature of the communication when the officers were originally dispatched to the scene.

This article states that the original dispatch was "one minute after Kristine called 911". Previous articles have referred to the original dispatch as a "domestic violence report" without specifying what code or other information was included in the radio call.

It would be interesting to see the exact details of the original dispatch with some background on the "normal" prioritization of such calls.

We don't have that information because the police are unwilling to release it. What we have is what's been taken from a scanner recording. That was stated in previous pieces here and on the news channel sites. We don't have the police dispatch side because they won't release it.

Also stated in a previous piece was that step up cover means exactly what you think it means--that the officer wanted his back up there asap. That call went out before he says he's arrived. It'd be nice to know when he received the dispatch message and where he was. It'd be nice to know where all the cars were. Maybe the police will get around to releasing the information.

And she asked the operator to please hurry, and if the police were coming soon. So, it's not like she was the one who downplayed the situation. A domestic violence call is supposedly a high priority call, but we aren't being told either by the police what priority the call was given by the dispatcher. More info they won't release, until the "investigation" is done, if then.